[ Close Window ] InfoInterventions 6.27.03 Empathetic Cooperation and Tactical Media - Toward Infopeace? Annick T.R. Wibben, Co-Investigator, InfoTechWarPeace 'It is a process of positional slippage that occurs when one listens seriously to the concerns, fears, and agendas of those one is unaccustomed to heeding when building social theory, taking on board rather than dismissing, finding in the concerns of others borderlands of one's own concerns and fears...' (Millennium 1994: 317) Christine Sylvester, a thinker and writer of Feminist International Relations, introduced 'empathetic cooperation' as a feminist method. Concerned with 'getting through and around intended and unintended repetitions of men's place and knowledge'(321), she urges that this requires more than a simple critique, more than placing alternative knowledge besides accepted truths. The process of positional slippage that is central to empathetic cooperation makes it possible to identify events and practices that tend to go unnoticed in international politics. What is more, empathetic cooperation becomes 'a vehicle of disturbance that can go beyond the limitations of any given theory, beyond debates that never quite see what is missing, and beyond awkward insertions of 'women' into epistemologies that deny them certain places'(321). Geert Lovink, not in his comments on this site, but in an earlier statement on Tactical Media After 911 describes tactical media as 'post-oppositional' because 'instead of complaining about mainstream media censoring, hiding the truth etc., we can use them as 'portals' that lead to other news sources and opinions.' In Defining Tactical Media, Sandra Braman portrays the current movement as "the first set of media practices designed in pursuit of informational power - power enacted through control over the informational bases of instrumental, structural and symbolic forms of power… the medium as content.' Tactical media blurs news, political commentary, art and consumption moulding new modes of alternatives media where the important marker is that 'tactical media practitioners are not afraid of power and therefore willing to take up the tools of the past and of those whom they critique' as David Garcia points out. What, I want to ask here, can happen when we explore the interstices of empathetic cooperation and tactical media? While tactical media at times (over-) emphasise technological aspects of the intervention, both might be perceived 'methods that disturb all our places… unsettling them and causing slippage or mobility in knowledge that prepares the way for cooperative reinterpretations'(321). Empathy, as Sylvester also notes, 'taps the ability or willingness to enter into the feeling or spirit of something and appreciate it fully in a subjectivity-moving way'(326) - could not tactical media, or maybe it does already in its pluriformity, make empathetic cooperation possible? How does the medium as content 'take on board the struggles of others by listening to what they have to say in a conversational style that does not push, direct or break through to a linear progression which gives the comforting illusion that one knows where one goes'(326)? As Lovink views it, 'tactical media break open monolithic analyses and introduce new, personal voices and "cool theory" that do not fit into yesterday's political schemes.' When talking of empathy, let us be careful not to slip into displays of sympathy where one's own subject position remains fixed, where one might through 'substitution of oneself for another [colonize] the other's position as one's own'(327). Listen carefully to Jim Blight who notes that empathy makes for good intelligence precisely because it infopeace.org | 911 http://www.watsoninstitute.org/infopeace/911/article.cfm?id=64 1 of 3 5/4/13 12:00 AM